Heroic Thok - Restoration Edition

tldr: answer the questions; other 2 healers are Resto Druid and Disc Priest and they both have at least 10 i-lvl on me

My name is Energydrinks, and I have a couple questions for you pros out there.
I usually always play Enhancement, except for Juggernaut and, now, Thok, and I have a few questions for this fight.

a) What type of build should I go with? I figure I should go with Crit from what i've read, just want to make sure.
b) What are the best glyphs to use on this fight?
c) Is it worth breaking my 4 set for heroic warforged helm and heroic crit gloves if I go for a crit build?
d) Which two trinkets should I use out of the Thok, Nazgrim, and Sha trinkets? I have all 3 from normal.

As of now I have Gaze of Arrogance ( heroic ) on, but I also have a normal Kardis Scepter and Heroic Norushen Barrier. Feel free to criticize my reforges and gems and stuff, but for the most part I haven't even played my resto spec since I started heroic raiding.

I can't link anything as this is my first post, but if you look up Energydrinks - Sargeras on google i'm the first result, if you're really looking to critique.

My next raid isn't until sunday, so I have plenty of time to work out a good build before then.

a) Crit is good for regen, but when it comes to throughput on thok crit and mastery are very close to each other, I recomend using an addon like Resto shaman stat analyzer to see which one gives the most throughput, it can vary from fight to fight

b)I use riptide and healing stream totem glyph, for the 3rd glyph i've started trying the fire elemental glyph (allowing to have more fire elementals channeling on me when things get tough).

c) Yes and yes, our 4pc is garbage, if used properly it just like 1-2% increase on healing, you can get that from offpieces with good itemization.

d) I think it depends if u run 10 or 25 man raiding, from what i've heard the thok trinket is good on 25 man but on 10 man it's crappy, so it should be the sha one and either nazgrims if u run 10 or thok's if u run 25. I'm not 100% sure so i'd say test them and see which one gives you the most throughput.

I usually play Ele, but i was also "forced" to go resto on this fight, we played with disc priest, resto druid and me, so here is my opinion:

a) I reforged my gear into haste, about 13k for the extra tick riptide and then into crit, got something like 10k spirit. I'm also heavy mastery due to shared gear with my ele gear.
b) I use Riptide, Healing stream totem and Tellec Currents on this fight. Keep riptide rolling on all 10 raid members, use rushing streams talent and use healing stream totem wisely, maybe also pick up the totem reset talent (forgot the name). During the kite phase you can regen some mana with the TC glyph.
c) no opinion on this, don't have the 4set piece too judge this, i'm running pice.
d) also not good opinion on this, I only have the sha trinket and horridon trinket avaible for me.

For the overall fight:
use your elementals wisely if you take the PE talent, you can have a elemental ready every stack phase. Keep healing rain placed all the time and keep the RT rolling on all members during stacking phase. Communicate with the other healing when to use cd's. The stack phase should be easy going if planned well, pay attention to not cross the 30 stacks limit.
For the kite phase is a warlock portal a great. You can kite the boss in a cirkel in the room and then towards the entrance or you can kite him up and down the entrance in the room.
Don't forget to dispel is also essential.
Overall a great fight for shaman in my opinion.

pick conductivity, snapshot the fuck out of your 40s healing rain & scrap the garbage rt glyph, use it only to buff your chain heal.

also stat priority:
haste << everything else

What??

You can't snapshot a Healing Rain with conductivity since it snapshots with your current buffs everytime you refresh it... Personally i prefer Ancestral Guidance for 25man because it's avaible every stack phase. Also it's good since my group use all their 3min cooldowns for the first stack phase, making AG a good CD for the short 2nd stack phase.

And despite what this guy says the Riptide glyph is super good since you don't really get a chance to cast that much and with the near unlimited mana you gain during this fight you can spam it how much you wan't. Chain Heal is also good though if you can get the cast off (which you should with sufficent haste).

The glyph of Water Shield is also good here if you wan't more mana regen.

During second shout phase and bats, our enhancer uses AG and then HTT. With Bloodlust for the bats, those get killed fast and we also are healing more. I use my HTT in this phase to prolong it preferably until 25-28 stacks, then transition.

During third shout phase, we just follow the plan of the first phase.

Usually the boss dies during third shout phase or shortly thereafter.

I use Riptide Glyph, CH Glyph (for kite phase, I do not use chain heal during shout phase) and HST Glyph. For talents I use Rushing Streams and PE.
Other choices might also work, guess you can experiment a bit.

Most important: DO NOT GET INTERRUPTED!
Second most important: Keep HR down!
Third most iportant: Keep HST down!
Rest: Keep Earthshield on tank and Riptides on everyone.

You can't snapshot a Healing Rain with conductivity since it snapshots

Which means that you indeed CAN snapshot the healing rain for 40 seconds whilst most trinket intellect temporary buffs last for 10-25 sec.

Without conductivity you're forced to gcd twice every two healing rains (because UE), being unable to cast chain heal during that time or HST. It just gets messy. Despite what most people think the prime gain from this talent is the ability to cast many more chain heals and not just keep a higher HR uptime. Conductivity also reduces your mana usage giving more space to spam a high-haste powered CH. You can leave NS to quickly snapshot a second HR during the stacked phase. No need to hard cast healing rain at all.

On a contrary note, with enough haste you are able to squeeze a chain heal cast after each screeching roar, rendering the riptide glyph useless, (as it usually happens).

It's my playstyle but I'm in no way saying it's the only correct way or something like that.

Im a resto with the same comp as you, I have a terrible latency so casting chains proved to be damn difficult, I cant reach a safe haste without fully regeming so I didn't bother.

So I just keep rain down, While stacks are low, I just wait to unleash elements before it, with high stacks, keeping the floor wet is better.

Thok's trinket is definitely better than Nazgrim's, When I was testing them, (upgraded normal Thok vs hc nazgrim) thok's output was double or more than the shitty multistrike, numbers where around 9% vs 4%. It will vary depending on what types of cast you make. For those than can cast a lot of chain heals it may be different.

Glyph of riptide, used telluric just because its allways there, and Chain heal so it could bounce to/from the tank

There are a thousand ways to set up your CDs, I do not use mines until second stack phase because we had really bad experiences in bat phase, so i just save myself for it.
I will spirit link the last stacks of phase 1 and 3 wich are the longest for us, 30 or 31 , and we will never push it over 24 25 on bat phase, all of us hate it, bloody dispells.

I absolutely agree on conductivity being a nice talent here IF you can cast enough chains to make it last. And I'd like to reach enough haste to do it but there is no snapshotting per se here, if we could snapshot trinket procs on healing rain, conductivity would be not nice, but awesome

Are you saying i don't understand what exactly snapshotting a hot means or that we simply cannot snapshot trinket procs? Two massively different statements.

Let's say i cast my healing rain with several trinket procs. I then cast enough chain heals to keep the rain down for exactly 40 seconds. The trinket buffs fade after 10 seconds of the healing rain duration. Is the healing rain's spell power immediately updated for the rest 30 seconds?

I'm confused as that's what i thought blizz meant by removing the ability to dot snapshot when Warlords ship. Enlighten me please.

Specing conductivity is extremely stupid... the point of thok is that you wont be casting any skills during the stack phase... so why do you pick a talent that you need to be casting all the time...

Glyph riptide, spec ancestral guidance for another CD and spam CH with Ascendance up with BoP..

You dont need to glyph the elemental because you have A Fire and a Earth elemental .... use the Fire on 1 phase and after that the Earth on another phase... on the third phase the fire elemental should be up again so no need to glyph that.

Thok's trinket is the best possible. Sha + Thok is perfect even in 10 man because 10 man stacked is really good.

Are you saying i don't understand what exactly snapshotting a hot means or that we simply cannot snapshot trinket procs? Two massively different statements.

Let's say i cast my healing rain with several trinket procs. I then cast enough chain heals to keep the rain down for exactly 40 seconds. The trinket buffs fade after 10 seconds of the healing rain duration. Is the healing rain's spell power immediately updated for the rest 30 seconds?

I'm confused as that's what i thought blizz meant by removing the ability to dot snapshot when Warlords ship. Enlighten me please.

If all your trinket procs or whatever else occur at the point your Healing Rain is @ 40 seconds, then your Healing Rain will benefit from those procs. If you recast your chain heal or whatever to rebuff it to 40 seconds when the trinkets wear off, then the Healing Rain will adapt to whatever spellpower/haste/crit/mastery you had when you rebuffed it ...

Saying something is stupid without knowing what you're capable of doing at 15.3k haste breakpoint is naive at best.

You know you can fit in CH, Healing Surge, or GHW between screeches at that haste level, right?

Shamans are very adaptable to fights. It's best to factor what classes you're healing with and how latency will affect those casts.

Do what best fits you and your raid.

I do not doubt that this type of build is an interesting alternative for a full-fledged Resto shaman.

However, having the situation of the OP in mind, I highly doubt that this build is recommendable for someone like him who is speccing Resto primarily for Thok and does not have perfect heal gear.

I think having him go heavy crit + Riptide glyph should work out well enough! I was at 290k hps with such a build yesterday, but unfortunately forgot to turn on the log - usually am at 250k.

Also, one should consider that the OP is obviously raiding 10man (three healers) and, from my personal opinion, CH is not that strong there without the glyph, since it may not jump from one group to the other and your own group may not have more than 3 people, hence reducing CH efficiency. Same problem with the Thok-Trinket on 10man - it has lower percentage on Thok hc than on e.g. Galakras, since I do not use CH (so it procs from less strong heals/hots) and may not hit the full amount of people. Still, I think it is quite strong regarding throughput.

Radius of Healing Rain is 12 yards -- CH jump range (sans glyph) is 12 yards. Pretty confident it will use up every CH jump.

Elios, have you even tried that level haste to see how well it performs? If not, you're calling something stupid you haven't even tested. The idea of casting CH after a screech with split raid stack is completely viable. The CH is also extending the duration of HR each time it lands. Open your mind up to new ways of healing. You just might learn something.

Shamans are versatile. There is no 1 right way to attack an encounter. Much depends on your healing team. 3 healing HM Thok with a druid? RT glyph not so ideal. 2 healing with a disc priest? RT glyph becomes very good.

Healing Rain has never worked with snapshotting unless something we changed very recently (post 5.4). However, ULE does interact with Conductivity in such a way as the HR will stay ULE buffed until it expires or you recast it. That's probably what's causing the confusion.

If you want to specifically gear for Thok progression, I would actually go for a haste build and aim for the 15,316 HR breakpoint. That is very strong on this fight, both for the extra HR and Riptide ticks, but also, the faster cast time on HR gives you more room for error in recasting HR between screeches (and even Chain Heal between early screeches). The Crit build actually loses value on that fight compared to a typical fight, because a lot of its value is in the increased Resurgence regen. On Thok, with Water Shield glyphed, you have near unlimited regen. I wouldn't use a mastery build; the key to healing this fight effectively is actually maximum throughput; you can't afford to leave people sitting at low health levels long enough to get a lot of gain from mastery; you need maximum throughput to get them topped ASAP. Mastery is only better than Crit on AoE healing below about 65% HP, and most of your healing (and all healing in the stacked phases of this fight is meaningful because of the mechanics) is going to be on targets above that threshold.

Radius of Healing Rain is 12 yards -- CH jump range (sans glyph) is 12 yards. Pretty confident it will use up every CH jump.

Elios, have you even tried that level haste to see how well it performs? If not, you're calling something stupid you haven't even tested. The idea of casting CH after a screech with split raid stack is completely viable. The CH is also extending the duration of HR each time it lands. Open your mind up to new ways of healing. You just might learn something.

Shamans are versatile. There is no 1 right way to attack an encounter. Much depends on your healing team. 3 healing HM Thok with a druid? RT glyph not so ideal. 2 healing with a disc priest? RT glyph becomes very good.

The topic with the CH range was just one thing that I saw in my raid - but it could also be my imagination. Guess I will have to take a look into that in-game. As for now, I take back what I said.

I agree with you on that shamans are absolutely versatile at the moment. You hear about all kinds of different builds that people are using successfully on heroic.

Since the screeches got nerfed, the healing is no longer the biggest issue. In our first attempts, we stacked too much heal CDs and reached 30 stacks for the first two to three attempts, always tuning down our CD usage.

Since I am also healing the fight with a Druid and a Disc (Our Disc has some serious issues on that fight and performs...subpar), I tried to explain our heal CD schedule above. What matters most on this fight imho is that you have a PLAN! If you organized everything, the fight is actually quite simple.

I do not doubt that this type of build is an interesting alternative for a full-fledged Resto shaman.

However, having the situation of the OP in mind, I highly doubt that this build is recommendable for someone like him who is speccing Resto primarily for Thok and does not have perfect heal gear.

I think having him go heavy crit + Riptide glyph should work out well enough! I was at 290k hps with such a build yesterday, but unfortunately forgot to turn on the log - usually am at 250k.

Also, one should consider that the OP is obviously raiding 10man (three healers) and, from my personal opinion, CH is not that strong there without the glyph, since it may not jump from one group to the other and your own group may not have more than 3 people, hence reducing CH efficiency. Same problem with the Thok-Trinket on 10man - it has lower percentage on Thok hc than on e.g. Galakras, since I do not use CH (so it procs from less strong heals/hots) and may not hit the full amount of people. Still, I think it is quite strong regarding throughput.

I think I am going to give this a shot. I figured Heavy Crit was the way to go, so that is what I will gem and reforge for.